Embodiments of the disclosed technology relate to a polarizer, a display device and a manufacturing method of a polarizer.
Three dimensional (3D) displays are one of the hotspots in the display technology. The three dimensional display can endow an image with high fidelity and give a viewer a sense of ultimate reality. The current 3D display technologies mainly comprise a glasses-free 3D display technology, a parallax barrier 3D display technology, a polarized light 3D display technology, a lenticular lens 3D display technology, and the like.
The principle of the polarization 3D display technology is as follows: a polarizer is provided on a display device so that the light passing therethrough becomes two kinds of polarized light with different polarization directions. As shown in FIG. 1, the two kinds of polarized light 11 and 12 with different polarization directions are arranged at an interval in the displaying region. When a viewer watches through a set of polarization glasses, images of the two different kinds of polarized light as in FIG. 1 are observed by the left eye and the right eye, respectively, so that the images for the left eye and the right eye can be different and a 3D display effect can be realized.
In the related art for realizing a polarization 3D display, the polarizer disposed on the display device is made by an alignment method such as multi-rubbing or ultraviolet light (UV light). Taking the UV light alignment method as an example, as shown in FIG. 2, a UV alignment film 22 is deposited on a transparent substrate 21; then as in FIG. 3, the UV alignment film 22 is illuminated by polarized light 24 (e.g., traversing polarized light) with a polarization direction (the first polarization direction) through a mask 23. The molecules of the UV alignment film 22 are cross-linked under the UV illumination so that the UV alignment film 22 being illuminated by the UV light can only transmit the polarized light of one polarization direction. Then, as shown in FIG. 4, the UV alignment film is illuminated by polarized light 26 (e.g., longitudinally polarized light) with another polarization direction (the second polarization direction, and different from the first polarization direction mentioned above) through a mask 25. Similarly, the molecules of the UV alignment film are cross-linked under the UV illumination so that the UV alignment film illuminated by the polarized light with the second polarization light can only transmit the polarized light of the second polarization direction.
Because the polarization directions of the polarized light used for the two illuminations are different from each other (generally, the two directions are perpendicular to each other for example), the resultant UV alignment film can transmit two polarized light with different polarization directions. With a design of the mask used as above, the regions for transmitting the two kinds of light with different polarization directions can be alternatively arranged at an interval on the polarizer.
However, as for manufacturing the polarizer using the UV light alignment method, the inventors have found that it has the following problems: two mask processes should be used and the manufacturing process is relatively complicated, and the cost for manufacturing the polarizer is relatively high.